particles in a glass
by CherryFlavoredChalk
Summary: They took the long way around, but they got there in the end. SeiferHayner, HaynerSeifer.


**a/n:** Normally, I wouldn't be updating so soon. I just up'd PS a few days ago, buuut I promised .Maker that I'd write her some Seiner to celebrate the aftermath of her SATs. She enjoys fluffy cuteness and a splash of angst, soooo...here it is. Oh, yes--lyrical credit to Tegan and Sara for "And Darling" (the coffeehouse song), and The Academy Is... for "Skeptics and True Believers". Check both out if you've got time.

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**particles in a glass**

**[seifer/hayner]**

_don't. be. so. scared,_

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**_One**.

When they first meet, there isn't a rousing fanfare. He does not run across the expanse of the playground and scream his devotion from the bottom of his child's lungs. In fact, he doesn't even make a move towards him.

But he watches.

Across the playground, over by the jungle gym is a pudgy little kid surrounded by his own little group of friends. He's standing on the swings, screeching boasts to his friends—the girl with a face that'll have wrinkles and worries embedded in it before she turns thirteen, the stone-faced blonde, the brown-haired boy with hair like an electric socket. But the swinging boy's three stooges aren't the focal point; it's _him_.

He has a voice that's far too loud, and eyes that were more mud-meets-moss than any sort of poetic beauty (but Seifer didn't possess the skills to wax poetic, so it didn't really matter). But his hair rose from his scalp like it was something that lived and breathed and _laughed_; the color of the dried sunflowers his mother kept in the vase on the kitchen table.

It wasn't anything momentous or special. Just Seifer's small hand gripping his mother's tightly as he thought, _That's so pretty._

He let go of his mother's hand, ignored her frantic calls of "Seifer! Seifer! Come back to mommy this instant, do you hear me? _Seifer_!" He crossed the playground, kicking up wood chips as he moved behind the swing set, pushing past the worry-girl, camera-kid, and the blonde with a face like a brick wall.

Reaching out felt a lot like trying to touch the sun—it felt like Icarus and his wings, like the stories his mother sometimes read to him in her mangled Greek, rough and coarse—and his fingers grasped the hair, pulling downwards.

The boy fell with a shout, collapsing on the woodchips. His friends squealed, except for the blonde boy, who sprang to life and grinned.

And later when his mother was scolding him ("You do not touch people, Seifer! You have to keep your hands to your—Seifer Almasy! Are you listening to me?"), he just looked at the strands in his palm and smiled.

**_Two.**

They're taking a spelling test, and by the act of some deity, he's sitting behind him.

He's gotten to know him a little better. Well, he knows his name at least.

"_Hay_ner."—From Olette, his little girlfriend, the mousy girl with a vocabulary heard by most junior high students, the creepy prodigy.

"Hayner!"—From teachers and parents and Pence, the fat boy who takes pictures that ends up in showcases at city hall.

"Hayner."—Low and quiet, from his best friend, that sulky Roxas-boy who's only seven and has already charmed half of the school. That sullen Roxas who smiled when Seifer yanked his pal off the swing last year and drew like how Seifer breathed—constantly, desperately.

Seifer's never said his name.

In the back corner (that's where the loud kids go, him and his crew, Hayner, that obnoxious boy with the red hair and his buddies), they're taking a spelling test and he's leaning over Hayner's shoulder, inhaling him like nobody's business. He smells like oranges and cheap laundry detergent, like fabric softener and springtime.

Olette twists in her seat and cranes her neck, a curious look on her face.

Seifer flips her off—a new trick he learned from his cousin during a family reunion—and laughs to himself.

**_Three.**

In the closet where the brooms and mops are kept, he learns how to kiss.

(but too bad it's with the wrong person.)

He's only eight and his eyes are screwed up tight, and he's trying so, so hard to concentrate on what Axel had told him to do in a situation like this. Fuu isn't making anything easier, what with her stony face and her skinny arms digging into his side. In fact, she looks kind of bored, so he lunges forward and lays one on her.

Fuu tastes like concrete and melted icicles and when she opens her eyes, she says flatly, "Not for me."

"Naw." He says desperately. "Come on, Fuu, c'mon, don't be dumb—"

She touches his hand softly and says, "Okay." She rearranges the glittering hair band and whispers, "Okay."

**_Four.**

There's this one time, this one time where he pushes Hayner down on the playground, right next to the swings and he yelps, "Gimmee your lunch money, lamer!" like he means it.

Hayner blinks up at him and his pearly little mouth opens,

_"Jerk."_

--and then kicks him in the groin.

**_Five**

The circus came to town, and Seifer wasn't afraid of lions or tigers or bears ("Oh my!" his mother said, her eyebrows raised). But he was hiding outside of the big house, knees scraped from crawling under the bleachers, palms smeared with dirt. He could hear his mother's nervous giggles from inside the tent, his father's booming laugh.

And then a small boy with eyes like the floorboards in his grandmother's house scuttles next to him and whispers, "Hey." That's all; just a "hey" and then his damp hair against the curve of Seifer's clavicle, completely at peace.

**_Six**

Hayner's dad died when they were eleven, and the whole school knew about it. Buzzbuzzbuzz. _"Hayner's dad died, did you hear?"_ Buzzbuzzbuzz. _"On the sidewalk, you know? Jogging. Heart failure."_ Buzzbuzzbuzz. _"Oh, that must be why he's like that."_

"Like what?"

"Oh. Well…You know. Just, like _that_."

Hayner hadn't said anything at all ( he sat there, quiet and still when they told him the news. Then, scraping back his chair from the desk, rose and said very quietly, "Alright." His posse followed him and it was later reported that Hayner Silverberg--that loud-mouthed idiot, the hard-faced little boy—was crying, curling up in the boys' toilets.)

Someone in the hallway laughed and said, "I always knew there was something wrong with him. At least now he has an actual reason to be such a dick."

That same laughing person ended up sniveling in the nurse's office while he nursed a bruised jaw.

**_Seven**

Seifer's developed a bit of a problem.

He's taken to kind-of-not-really stalking Hayner on his way home from school. Ever since some no-name idiot with too much time on his hands stopped the boy on his way home from school and curled his fingers around Hayner's chin, Seifer's been following behind him like some sort of pathological weirdo.

It's not like he does it everyday. It's only when he's not accompanied by Pence or Roxas, since Olette's a girl and would probably attract more trouble. He wouldn't even have done it if Roxas hadn't turned to him in the bathroom and said flatly, "I have soccer practice on Wednesdays, piano on Fridays." Seifer had scoffed, "Like I care, shrimp."

Roxas had smiled.

**_Eight**

Valentine's Day Dance. Eight hours, thirty-five minutes, fifty-six seconds.

Seifer's in the process of ditching his date (Fuu, who was dolled up and looking halfway pretty in certain lighting—but she was his best friend and had more knowledge that he thought appropriate, what with her shoving him towards the doors and snapping, "_Go_.") and Hayner's back by the Dumpsters, his face obscured by shadows and night and Roxas.

Hayner is kissing Roxas is kissing Hayner.

Dried sunflower hair flopping over his forehead without the use of gel, his mouth pressed urgently to Roxas's, his fingers wrapped in the other boy's spiked hair. It's when he looks up and Seifer can see his eyes clouded with affection and need and want that Seifer croaks, "_Faggots_."

Hayner winces, but Roxas giggles into the base of his best friend's neck, tickling the column of his throat with his tongue. "Necessary evil, Almasy," Roxas croons around the skin, and his eyes burn. "Absolutely. Necessary."

**_Nine **

His mother's newest thing is telling him to memorize everything (he hates it, he really hates it when she does that—it reminds him of that Axel kid that's like Hayner with red hair and thinner bones), to file up everything in his mind and save it for later.

But Seifer doesn't want any of that. He doesn't care that high school is supposed to hold the best years of his life. He'd just like to speed things up.

Fast-forward through the shocking changes; Olette becoming the mandatory beatnik lesbian, the ones with oddly-cut hair and feminist empowerment speeches, Pence becoming the quiet kid who hacks into the school's computer system for fun. Fast-forward through sloppy hook-ups with Fuu and sometimes Axel, through the forced Orthodox Catholic meeting with the priest, through a very messy divorce and his mother screeching at his retreating father in broken Greek.

Fast-forward through Hayner moving three houses down from him, through Hayner being gay with Roxas and wearing rainbow-patterned wristbands and a defiant glare. Hayner playing guitar with Roxas, who's into the whole garage-band scene and still comes around in the hallways to grin and laugh at Seifer whenever he's got the time.

Fast-forward through Axel's charging out of the proverbial closet and leading to a backseat meeting with Roxas, who was caught on film by Pence (_traitor_, said Roxas coolly, but he shrugged. _Ah, well_.). Fast-forward through Hayner waking half of the town up with his argument with his "boyfriend" and then retreating, because the worst thing (apart from being gay, Seifer thought) was being _alone_ and gay.

Fast-forward through his mother's crazed speeches about the destruction of homosexuality, of her barging in his room to see Seifer and Rai sitting too close on his bed (_idiot_, Seifer thought), of her subsequent tears and having the priest's hairy hands thrusting his head under the baptismal water, intoning in his slow, rumbling Greek that Seifer was steeped in sin, and needed to repent. "For your eternal soul," he grumbled, and Seifer thought, _Haven't got one._

Rewind and stop on Fuu sitting on the pillow in his room, small fingers wrapped around the headboard. She looks at him through the dimmed lights and mutters to herself, moving the headboard back and forth, back and forth.

**_Ten**

Hayner still plays guitar, even though Roxas isn't there to accompany him on drums.

He plays in gritty clubs and dingy coffeehouses. It's always something soft, like a cover of some no-name indie band, or a folk song, or even something he's made up himself.

His voice is low and quiet and warm, smoothing over chords you have to strain to hear. His voice, like upturned earth, singing, _"I know you don't mean to be mean."_

Seifer can't play guitar, or sing. He can't quote poetry or ramble metaphors off the tip of his tongue like Olette can (who, for a beatnik-boho lesbian is getting awfully close to Hayner). He doesn't even have enough money for an entry fee, and has to sneak out the back when he sees the manager coming.

Outside of the coffeehouse, under the awning to keep out of the rain, Seifer holds his tape recorder to the thin walls and hears Hayner as if he was right next to him. _"I hope you know the same for me."_

**_Eleven**

Seifer fucks a lot of girls.

He holes up with Selphie, head cheerleader and resident starlet on Halloween. He scores Kairi, who giggled every time he touched her. Namine, who wasn't his to touch, as she was Olette's girlfriend. Even Olette, who turned out to be as gay as a log.

Quistis. Tifa. Yuffie. Rinoa. Rikku. Aerith. Paine. Larxene. Yuna.

He never touches Fuu. He hasn't moved his fingers toward her in a way that wasn't platonic since third grade, even if she remains a permanent resident in his bed. He kicks other conquests out to make room for Fuu. Fuu is _special_.

Curled up next to him, she's still as he rants about sports, Hayner doing sports, music, Hayner's music, the way Hayner walks in the hallway.

"Enough." She commands, exasperated. "No more."

Seifer frowns. "Shut up. He's just…not right. He's just—" _wonderful_. "Stupid. Pisses me off."

Fuu's smile is tiny as she presses her nose against Seifer's. "Coward," she drawls.

**_Twelve **

Eighteen, and it's over. School, friendships, girlfriends, boyfriends.

Rai's still as stupid as they come (but somehow, he managed to become valedictorian when nobody was looking. Fuu's reasoning was that it had initially been Pence, and Rai had just bumped him off.), Fuu's still as monotonous and flippant as ever. Seifer's still cowardly and volatile, even if he surprised everyone by graduating with a 3.3 for a GPA.

Everything is still the same.

Rai's proposing a road trip that sounds stupider out loud than it probably did in his head, and Fuu's rolling her eyes, flatly naming negative consequences. Seifer's lolling against Rai's van and nodding to whatever Fuu's saying when _he_ walks past.

Him. _Hayner_.

He's holding hands with Olette, who's straightening her graduation cap and prattling on about something philosophical and complicated while patting the loose curls on her shoulders. He's walking past Seifer and his gang with that same Hayner-walk—the light swagger, the chin tilted upwards.

His hair is still the color of dried sunflowers, and Seifer can smell the orange scent of his shampoo from where he's standing.

"Hey." Seifer says, for no reason. He just feels like talking.

Hayner squints in the bright sunshine and gives him a lopsided grin. He lets go of Olette's hand (who huffs and stomps off to be angry and girly somewhere else), walks past Roxas and Axel and Pence and Fuu and Rai—up to Seifer, looking up into his eyes.

"Hey." He says back, and it's beautiful.

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**a/n:** I'm going to ask you to give me things to read. I get bored, every now and then. TELL ME WHAT GOODNESS YOU'VE BEEN READING. I wanna laugh/cry/salivate too. :3 Oh, yes, and reviews. Reviews are great.


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